Doctoral candidate Shadi Rezapour successfully defended her dissertation, "From User-generated Text to Insight; Context-aware Measurement of Social Impacts and Interactions Using Natural Language Processing," on July 20. Her committee included Associate Professor Jana Diesner (chair); Professor Ted Underwood; Roxana Girju, professor of linguistics; and Karrie Karahalios, professor of computer science.

Health care workers often don't adopt new guidelines for best practices in medical care until well after those guidelines are established. A team of researchers led by Eunice E. Santos, the dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has developed a new computational modeling and simulation framework to analyze decision-making and identify effective dissemination strategies for medical guidelines.

iSchool researchers will present their work at The Web Conference 2021. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 12-23, will address the evolution and current state of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, public policy, and Web-based applications.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Dong Wang will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021. He is currently an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame.

Doctoral candidate Yun Hao successfully defended her dissertation, "Towards a Better Understanding of Music Playlist Titles and Descriptions," on April 6. Her committee included Professor J. Stephen Downie (chair); Associate Professor Vetle Torvik; Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch; Xiao Hu, associate professor at The University of Hong Kong; and Andreas Ehmann, manager of research/data science at Pandora Inc.

Professor and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Director Bertram Ludäscher will be the keynote speaker for a webinar hosted by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) on February 10. The webinar, "Toward Open, Reproducible, and Reusable Research," will present projects, approaches, and practices that advance research sharing for reproducibility and reuse.

PhD student Linh Hoang will present her research with Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch at the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium, which will be held virtually from November 14-18. The symposium showcases the latest innovations from the community of biomedical informatics researchers and practitioners.

Associate Professor Jana Diesner will present her research on biases in data science at the Big Data Summit, which will be held virtually on November 12. The annual summit brings together experts from the University of Illinois Research Park, industry, and academia to share knowledge about big data and its business applications through panel discussions, keynote presentations, and networking opportunities. This year's summit will include sessions on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation.

Members of Associate Professor Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present two posters at the 11th Annual Maritime Risk Symposium, which is being held virtually from October 26-30. The symposium, hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), will focus on maritime resilience and the impact of COVID-19 with regard to resiliency for future global upsets.

The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Associate Professor Jingrui He a two-year, $319,568 grant to study how the risk of foreign influence on news media can be mitigated. Her project, "Towards a Computational Framework for Disinformation Trinity: Heterogeneity, Generation, and Explanation," will lead to a new suite of algorithms and software tools to detect, predict, generate, and understand disinformation dissemination. Hanghang Tong, associate professor of computer science at Illinois, will serve as co-principal investigator.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Zoe LeBlanc will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2021. She is currently a postdoctoral associate and the Weld Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 26th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2020), which will be held virtually August 22-27. The conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research, and experiences.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has been named a 2020-2021 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center'

Members of Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present a tutorial, paper, and posters at the 6th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held virtually from July 17-20. The conference brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

The use of data science tools in research across campuses has exploded–from engineering and science to the humanities and social sciences. But there is no established data science discipline and no recognized way for various academic fields to develop and integrate accepted data science processes into research. Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has proposed a framework for guiding researchers and curriculum development in data science and for aiding policy and funding decisions. She outlines the approach in the journal Communications of the ACM.

Professor and Dean Eunice E. Santos presented her research and served as a panelist at the Workshop on Women in Data Science (WiDS), which was held online on April 24. The workshop was part of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 36th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), which brings together researchers in data engineering and data-intensive systems. Santos gave an invited address, "Social Information, Data Modeling and Analysis Frameworks."

Dawei Zhou and Yao Zhou, PhD students in computer science, will present the work of iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, at The Web Conference 2020. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 20-24, will address the evolution and current state of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, public policy, and Web-based applications.

Professor Ted Underwood has received a $73,122 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the consequences of error in digital libraries. While digital libraries represent an immense storehouse of knowledge, the texts are full of errors because of the imperfect process by which they are transcribed optically.

People are being asked to change their behavior to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Dean Eunice E. Santos and PhD students Suresh Subramanian and Vairavan Murugappan studied the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the social phenomena and events that influenced whether people in Mexico decided to cross the border into the U.S. at various times during the outbreak. Their work provides insights that can help public health officials plan for events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel.

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has received funding from the Center for Social and Behavioral Science Small Grant program at the University of Illinois to help community organizations tell more effective data stories.

The goal of the "Data Storytelling for Community Organizations" project is to develop and pilot a toolkit, based on the iSchool's Data Science Storytelling course (IS 590DST), to bring storytelling in information science to community organizations. The project will create a data storytelling kit for community organizations, position public libraries to distribute this toolkit, and support community organizations using the toolkit.